Little Helpers

So I'm starting to change my mind on how I feel about all the little kids living around us. Three more just came home from a longer christmas vacation yesterday, so there are five little boys living across the yard from us now, ranging in age from 2 to about 12 years old. It's better now with the older ones around, they keep the youngest in line. And the best part is they're our little helpers! We'll start doing chores or things outside like making a fire to burn our garbage or putting up clothes on the line to dry and the boys will just start helping us! We gave them some starburst and banana bread for helping. I've noticed they're always around the yard area, and if our doors are open they'll come and sit in the doorway or on the steps and watch us or the older ones will talk to us since they know English. We never know what we'll see when we look out the windows or doors with these kids, the youngest is seen sometimes peeing off the edge of their doorstep, or worse. And they climb up our huge trees in the backyard, really high up on tiny little branches. It will be different, quieter at least, once school starts next week (I think). And we found out that our other neighbor, Mosese and his family might be moving to an outer island. So there will be less kids around. His kids and wife have been gone for the last month though anyways.

Brett's birthday was fun on Sunday. I made a cake from scratch, we still had no eggs but it turned out. Then in the afternoon our neighbors invited us to a church service and feast, we thought it might be a few hours, but turned out to be a 2 hour church service for the kids going back to school, and a couple hours at the feast with lots of speeches. There were lots of long tables set up, each area with different food and drinks from each family. Mele, who we had lunch with on our first Sunday and works in catering, made sure to pass down some really good spaghetti to us. And Silosi and Ana, our neighbors, had roasted a pig for the feast.

The peace corps couple on an outer island, Eric and Melanie, finally found a way to get into town this week, the Olavaha boat is running again finally! First they were going to get in for dinner last night, then early this morning, and now hopefully they'll make it this afternoon. The boat keeps getting delayed or is running late. The smaller boat, Tautahi, made it this morning. So the stores are all really busy today, there's a lot of new food and supplies in that were running low. We heard rumors of ice cream and Brett went looking but didn't find any. We did get a big tray of eggs though. Another transportation problem - the airplanes, maybe because the petrol was getting low, I don't know. But Grant and his brother were going to Nuku'alofa and his brother got stuck here last night and will hopefully get on the plane this afternoon, the morning flight was cancelled.

In other news, the puppies are doing good, we've picked out a little brown furry one to keep, new photos are posted on the link to the left.